American Skin (film)

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 33% of 18 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 4.8/10.[9] Metacritic assigned the film weighted average score of 24 out of 100, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[10]

IndieWire's David Ehrlich described the film as "like a cross between Frank Capra and Tommy Wiseau" and stated that it "is so bad that he deserves to be canceled on artistic grounds alone", giving it a D grade.[11] Xan Brooks at The Guardian raised the issue surrounding director Nate Parker's previous controversial acquittal of a rape while he was a student at Pennsylvania State University, and found the film to be "clotted, so strident and so thickly cloaked in self-pity that its impassioned story risks becoming worryingly self-serving. This interpretation isn't helped by Parker's decision to cast himself in the leading role of Linc Jefferson, a noble hero driven to breaking point by a miscarriage of justice." [12] Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times also raised the issue of the controversy surrounding the movies of Parker and Polanski being shown at the Venice Film Festival and in his review called American Skin "a clumsy facsimile" of a film.[13] Parker addressed his past rape controversy during a press conference at the Venice Festival, saying that his "response during that time obviously left a lot of people frustrated and angered a lot of people and I apologize to them. I am still learning and growing." [14] Alonso Duralde from The Wrap wrote that "American Skin is a clunky, heavy-handed film that takes a pressing contemporary issue and flattens it under two genres the writer-director seems ill-equipped to handle — the mockumentary and the courtroom drama", adding that "There's certainly an idea for a movie here, but it's one that's undercut at nearly every turn, from the straw-man/mouthpiece arguments Parker's script puts into the mouths of most of the characters (including policemen and convicts alike) to the film's periodic abandonment of the student-footage gimmick".[15]

There was some positive feedback for the film. The Hollywood Reporter reported that American Skin was cheered by the Venice audience and received a seven-minute standing ovation.[16] Owen Gleiberman of Variety said, "It's a good movie: tense, bold, angry, empathetic, provocative, observant, morally engaged... The script - is what I associate with a certain kind of powerful playwriting, as in a drama like 12 Angry Men. The dialogue of is searing, forceful, edge-of-the-brain topical."[17] Elisabeth Sereda of the Golden Globe Awards hailed American Skin as "a lesson in race relations in a country with a current government that is not famous for knowing or caring much about this topic." Sereda wrote: "The film is anything but predictable, and its message is far from the usual cliché we hear on the news."[18]

On September 7, 2019, American Skin was voted the "Best Film" in the Sconfini Section of the Venice Film Festival, becoming the first American film based on the theme of racial injustice to be awarded the prize.[19]